Looking for input on connection issues

Hoping the [H] community can help me understand how to fix my problems. Trying to play Titanfall 2 and the game partially connects but ends up hanging before fully starting. EA claims it is my network (see attached UO trace report) while Comcast says everything is OK. I'm way past my level of understanding on this and feel stuck between EA and Comcast.


The following paragraph is from one of the EA admins, and the table is my UO trace report (the EA admin put in the highlights):

As I advised you in the other thread one look at your UO Trace and it is obvious that you have connection issues, you have packet loss of 1% on a number of hops and your Ping best/worst is very high. A Ping best/worst difference of over 100ms points to issues with your network and on your UO Trace you have Ping best/worsts differences of 200ms. This is a huge issue. In the image below, I have highlighted the issues with your UO Trace. If your ISP has seen your UO Trace and said that they can see no issues then they must not know how a connection works as your UO Traces show big issues with your connection.




Is the EA guy right? And if so, is this really a Comcast issue? It seems the problems start with the hop to Telia.net. If he is right, how in the world do I get Comcast to addess this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Uhh...this looks like you are using a VPN service. Can you verify that you are NOT using a VPN?

I am not using a VPN service.

I have seen similar-trace reports for other EA games in online forums (lots of hops, a few 100% loss stops towards the end, etc.).

Based on this it looks to be a peering issue... Hops look 1-6 which is comcast... 7-10 look weird... and where I see the increased latency.

I am confused why you would be going through Telia? Are you connecting to a European EA server?

No idea what the hell this UO Trace is supposed to tell you about your connection to EA, since it's just a basic Traceroute.

I checked it out myself and I route through telia.net as well. Also, their documentation is crap, dropped or "unknown hosts" in traceroutes don't automatically mean issues on the wire - this can just be routers that block ICMP, etc.

The best you can do right now would be to determine if it's a port issue on your router. Try connecting your PC directly to the internet modem without the router and see if Titanfall 2 works. This traceroute data is basically useless for troubleshooting. The polling information in this UO Trace utility does nothing more than ping each IP address in the hop like 100 times and give you the best and worst ping times on that. Even a very slight hiccup in the connect on one ping out of a 100 would skew those numbers. This type of support by people who don't really know networking in an attempt to point fingers is infuriating.

I love the support reps comment about how your ISP doesn't know how connections work, a 1% packet loss is certainly within threshold, and any network administrator worth their salt knows that traceroutes are not reliable ways of tshooting network issues.

These telia.net issues are reported all over the web with EA Games:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical...C-Failed-to-connect-to-EA-ONLINE/td-p/5919468
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/forum/threadview/2979150494258115160/

Telia.net is a Finnish ISP, and I have no idea why EA routes through them, but it seems everyone does it when you tracert to the hostname easo.ea.com

Additionally, by virtue of reverse IP the tracerts are telling you the geolocation of the server hops:

nyk-b5-link.telia.net
nyk-bb3-link.telia.net
ash-bb3-link.telia.net
ash-b1-link.telia.net

NYK = New York, which is the first hop - looks like you live in Kansas
ASH - Asheville, I assume - because I route through there as well, and I live in the Southeast.

The EA support you received is shit, and they are sending you on a while goose chase. I'm not familiar with Titanfall 2 and its server selection, but are there other geographic server locations for you to test? I doubt easo.ea.com has anything to do with Titanfall 2, this is just a generic traceroute to check your ISP connectivity.

I'm actually irrationally upset at this, lol.

Identical issues to yours:

https://forums.titanfall.com/en-us/discussion/5174/high-ping/p4

Here are my results:

Cmustang87 said:

These telia.net issues are reported all over the web with EA Games:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical...C-Failed-to-connect-to-EA-ONLINE/td-p/5919468
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf4/forum/threadview/2979150494258115160/

Telia.net is a Finnish ISP, and I have no idea why EA routes through them, but it seems everyone does it when you tracert to the hostname easo.ea.com

Click to expand...

Technically its mostly a Swedish company. It is 37% owned by Sweden, 3.2% by Finland... And after looking at their carrier map they seem to have POPs in the US. I am a little bit surprised I have not had to deal with them in the US before.

The short of it is this, unless you know the server you are actually connecting to - this tool and troubleshooting is fruitless and nothing more than a wild goose chase. The issue is on EA's side and they are shifting the blame because the high latency issues seem to reside on the hops through telia.net servers, which is where you route when your comcast hands you off.

In your report, you don't have a single connection problem until the traffic gets to Telia.

NoOther said:

Technically its mostly a Swedish company. It is 37% owned by Sweden, 3.2% by Finland... And after looking at their carrier map they seem to have POPs in the US. I am a little bit surprised I have not had to deal with them in the US before.

Click to expand...

I'm guessing they have a large presence in the US somewhere, it's just that their IP registrations all come from Europe, so doing IP lookups on any of the addresses show them from Europe, even if the hops are in the US.

And yes, it appears you are correct - I only quickly visited their site and I saw something about Finland, and just closed.

Cmustang87 said:

The short of it is this, unless you know the server you are actually connecting to - this tool and troubleshooting is fruitless and nothing more than a wild goose chase.

Click to expand...

It may not be a wild goose chase if comcast has a bad route set choosing the telia pop to go through rather than another choice with less lag. But taken alone it only paints a small portion of the picture.

It's possible that the issues could technically be with EAs Azure/AWS servers, too... or - how BGP is advertising to internet routers for it to be reached.

I just don't think this is an issue that's solved with ICMP, lol.

NoOther said:

It may not be a wild goose chase if comcast has a bad route set choosing the telia pop to go through rather than another choice with less lag. But taken alone it only paints a small portion of the picture.

Click to expand...

I'm on a much smaller ISP with fiber to the house, and I take a nearly identical path, with the exception of the NYK hop.

I wonder if the OP tries multiple reports if it will ever skip the NYK hop and go through ATL like mine did. Other than the ISP handoff, that's the only thing that's different.

Thanks for all the responses! I knew I could count on this forum. As I said, I'm way past my level of comfort with networking on this.

I do have a choice of EA servers when starting the game. I'm in NJ so usually just accept the default (NY) because it has the lowest ping. There are other servers throughout both the US and the world, so I could try them.

Agree with other who say the problem is beyond your ISP. Double check any software firewalls running on your system for outbound block rules. Windows firewall has a bad habit of tossing up a small "Do something with me" window when a game launches. If it took one of your clicks intended for the game client and used it to create an outbound "block" rule, a port needed for the game to work may be blocked.

If your problems continue on the alternative servers, get a list of ports required for the game to work.

I have manually opened all the UDP and TCP ports based on EA's own port forwarding list.

PTRMAN said:

I have manually opened all the UDP and TCP ports based on EA's own port forwarding list.

Click to expand...

That's only for your router/firewall equipment that's connected to your ISP. That doesn't control what the Windows Firewall permits or blocks.

Try connecting to something like an Atlanta or Chicago server.

But the thing that kills me is that this worked well for nearly a year. then in early\mid-December it started acting up.


Oddly enough, now things are working again. Don't have the problems (at the moment) that I've been having for the past two weeks. Not sure if it was speaking to EA and having them (supposedly) elevate my case, posting about my issue on their forum, manually setting all the ports open, or what, but it appears to be working now (still connecting to the NY server).

It can be a combination of port forwarding, patience, and just luck of the draw based on the time when you are trying to connect to games.

The issue is on EA's side, I can 99.9% guarantee it. There are a lot of threads and conversations on other forums with your exact problem statement with other games (Battlefield, Star Wars BF, etc.) with the exact same runaround using this UO Trace "utility" (psst, it's just tracert with some fancy built-in features), which seems hardly coincidental.

Ah, and problems like these are only going to get worse as the ISPs test their new found non-NN limits.... Services will blame your ISP, your ISP will blame their peering partners, the peering partners will blame the service/ISP and we will be the ones getting dicked with no way to resolve......

A VPN will probably work short term to bypass these shit hops, until ISPs start throttling all VPN connections, or worse charging a premium (or even completely blocking for all non-business accounts) for us to even be allowed to use them.....